


starry night

by river_of_words



Series: you're trying to conceal a euphonium [3]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Allusions to Suicidal Ideation, Gen, Light Angst, also it's yaz confronts the doctor hours again!, because i like writing that apparently, there's also one line that sounds a little bit gaslighty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:48:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26123758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/river_of_words/pseuds/river_of_words
Summary: Yaz tries to be a good friend. The Doctor does not make it easy.Or: Yaz and the Doctor sit on a beach and draw some circles in the sand.Or: Yaz bravely endeavours to talk to the Doctor about suicidal ideation.Set somewhere during series 11.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan
Series: you're trying to conceal a euphonium [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1885408
Comments: 20
Kudos: 45





	starry night

The Doctor’s stillness was jarring when you saw it, but unobtrusive when you didn’t. The latter was more unsettling, Yaz thought. In moments without imminent threat or acute danger, the Doctor would vanish like the retreating tide. Her ability to commandeer a room, and everyone’s attention, inverted to show its negative image, an ability to leave a room, and company, without anyone noticing.

Yaz had seen her do this trick five times now. Five times that she had not noticed the moment the Doctor had left the three of them alone. Five times that it had taken half an hour, an hour, longer even, for her brain to start ringing the alarm bells. _Warning. The Doctor has not been seen for fifty minutes_. Or however long it had been. The passage of time was harder to keep track of on alien planets, with different light cycles.

Yaz wandered barefoot through the surf of the purple-sanded beach the Doctor had brought them to. (“You have to see the bioluminescent fish when the sun goes down! The waves look like flames! It’s beautiful.”) And it really was. The sun was starting to set and with every step Yaz took tiny fish shot through the shallow water like sparks jumping off a bonfire.

She looked at how the beach curved away from the water in the distance. She couldn’t see past the bend. She wondered if this is how Sonya used to feel when _she_ disappeared. It’s not like Yaz was going to _do_ anything, she’d just wanted to be alone. And Sonya knew that. Probably. But Yaz was finding a new appreciation for the doubt her sister might have felt. The powerlessness. The panic gripping her by the throat fighting with her brain that kept telling her it was irrational, you’re overreacting, she’s only been gone an hour, everyone wants time alone sometimes. But then again, the reason why Yaz had wanted to be alone was not exactly making her feel better about the possible reasons the Doctor kept doing this.

If she even _was_! Doing anything! Yaz kicked the water in a tiny explosion of fiery fish. The Doctor might not be doing anything at all. Yaz might be assuming too much. Putting her own baggage on the Doctor. It’s not like she’d asked about it. It didn’t really feel like something they _could_ ask about. It was too vague a question. Yaz wouldn’t get an answer she wanted. Too much plausible deniability.

_“What do you mean, Yaz? I don’t go anywhere. I’m always with you guys.”_

And she’d smile sweetly and propose a new destination, and Yaz didn’t know what else to do so she’d just go along with it. And they’d have an adventure and all of Yaz’s worries faded to the background, because the Doctor was quick and clever and got them out all the trouble she got them into. And how could Yaz ever have thought anything was wrong? But then–

Then they’d land somewhere without danger. Without adrenaline and excitement. A beach, an observatory, a museum, a forest, a library. Always alien, always beautiful, always with very few people around. And while – after a quick and enthusiastic description of the sights by the Doctor – the three of them walked around in wonder, silence would fall. And it would take them way too long to notice the wrongness of it.

Though she didn’t realise it at first, Yaz found the Doctor’s trail before she found the Doctor herself. A circle drawn in the sand, complex and distinctly alien-looking. It reminded Yaz a bit of the planetary symbols. She knew it wasn’t a language because the Tardis wasn’t translating it for her.

About fifty paces further she found another one circle. Thirty paces later, another. The distances between the circles kept decreasing – sometimes a couple of them were grouped together in a larger, more complex circle – until she’d walked all the way past the bend of the beach and stumbled across an enormous circle. Filled with interconnected smaller circles, it must have been at least ten meters across. The Doctor sat cross-legged in the sand, drawing in the sand with a stick. Yaz’s arrival got her attention and she looked up. Her face seemed to shift in the shimmering light of dusk.

Yaz looked at the maze of circles in amazement. “ _You_ drew this?”

“Yeah.” It came out as barely more than a hoarse whisper and the Doctor cleared her throat. “Yeah.”

“Didn’t know you liked to draw,” Yaz said, sitting down along the edge of the circle, close enough to say she was sitting next to the Doctor, but a bit further away than she’d sit from Ryan or Graham.

“I don’t really,” the Doctor said, putting her stick down.

“It’s pretty.”

“That’s just the purple sand. Makes it look pretty.”

Yaz frowned at her, baffled. Not accepting compliments, putting herself down, insecurity about her own skills, were so anathema to the Doctor that Yaz wasn’t sure she’d heard it right. “No, I mean it. It’s amazing.”

The Doctor didn’t respond.

“I like to draw sometimes,” Yaz tried. “Just doodling. To clear my head.”

The Doctor looked up at her in confusion, wide eyes shining in the starlight. “Clear your head of what?”

“You know,” Yaz shrugged. “Thoughts.”

The Doctor snorted. It’d have made Yaz feel mocked, but the absolute unadulterated innocent bewilderment the Doctor managed to put into the sound only made Yaz laugh too.

“You don’t like having thoughts?” the Doctor asked. “I love having thoughts! Thoughts, ideas. Even opinions sometimes! I’m having thoughts right now!”

Yaz giggled. “ _Bad_ thoughts,” she amended. “I don’t like having _bad_ thoughts.”

The Doctor’s face fell and her eyes drifted back to the spiral of circles. She picked up her stick again.

“Guess I’m doodling to clear my head too, then,” she muttered, starting a new, small circle next to the big circle.

“Is it working?”

Yaz took the Doctor’s silence as a no. She traced her fingers through the grooves of the circles. The sand was cold and hard and hurt her fingers.

“Do you want a stick too?”

Yaz looked up. “If you’ve got a spare.”

The Doctor produced another stick from her pocket and handed it to Yaz.

“How many sticks do you have in there?”

The Doctor grinned. “That’s for me to know and for you to wonder.”

Careful not to disturb the pattern in the sand, Yaz moved her legs, shifting her position so she was facing the Doctor. She started drawing a circle too.

“What thought is that?” the Doctor asked a couple of minutes later when Yaz paused. She looked up to see the Doctor watching her.

“Oh, I don’t know, nothing.” Yaz looked at her drawing. “It doesn’t really work like that. It’s not a one-to-one translation of thought to drawing. It’s more that the act of it is calming.” She looked back up when she realised the implication in the Doctor’s question. Yaz looked at the big circle and then at the smaller one the Doctor had just started, now joined by two other small ones. Yaz decided the smaller ones were probably easier to start with. She pointed at them with her stick. “What thought is that then?”

The Doctor looked at the circles for a moment, considering. Then she poked the tip of her stick into the middle of one. “You–”

“Me?” Yaz hadn’t meant to interrupt. “Sorry. Just surprised.” She couldn’t resist, though: “What about me?”

“Haven’t got that far yet,” the Doctor said, pointing at the circles like it was obvious. She pointed at the two other circles. “Ryan. Graham.”

Yaz considered those answers and then slowly looked at the enormous circle, absolutely packed with smaller circles like the one that represented her and Ryan and Graham. If a circle the size of a volleyball represented an entire person, what was a circle ten meter in diameter saying? The Doctor followed her gaze.

“Curiosity killed the cat, Yasmin Khan,” she warned.

“But satisfaction brought it back,” Yaz countered.

The Doctor shook her head. “These cats are not coming back.” She looked Yaz in the eye. “Leave them alone.”

There was something dark in her eyes, and it wasn’t just the lack of daylight. It kicked against the defiant streak in Yaz. She sat up, lifting her head.

“Why not?”

The Doctor uncrossed her legs and pulled up the knee closest to Yaz. Yaz could practically see the shutters close behind her eyes.

“Why not?” Yaz repeated a little louder, sitting up on her knees. “Why can’t we ask? Why aren’t we allowed to know? Why are apocryphal anecdotes and cryptic warnings all we _get_? What are you trying to scare us away from?” She saw the look on the Doctor’s face. “What, you think we didn’t notice? The evasions, the distractions, you never answer _any_ questions–”

The Doctor sat up. “I answer _a lot–_ ”

“About yourself!” Yaz interrupted. “About who you are! Where you’re from! What language you speak, who your family was, we know _nothing about you_!” She grabbed two fistfuls of sand in frustration and sighed, trying to regulate her tone. “We don’t need to know everything,” she continued. “You can have your secrets, everyone does, but I don’t–” She got stopped by an unexpected lump in her throat. She swallowed and exhaled a shaky breath. “I don’t know,” she said, trying to keep her voice level, “I don’t know what’s normal for you. I don’t know if I should be thinking about you as human or–” She met the Doctor’s eyes. “I don’t know when I should be worried.”

“Worried?” the Doctor seemed way too eager to use that point as an excuse not to have to respond to any of the other things Yaz had said. Yaz sighed inwardly about giving her that way out. “Worried about what?”

Yaz threw her stick at her.

“Oy!”

“About you!”

“About _me_?”

Yaz sank back down into the sand and found the Doctor’s eyes, hoping that she’d be able to read the truth in them. “I just want to know if I should be worried about you.”

There was a moment where Yaz saw a few different responses warring in the Doctor’s eyes. She didn’t know what the other options were, but dismissiveness won.

“Of course not.” The Doctor broke eye contact.

Yaz thought another one of those responses should probably have won. If convincing Yaz was the goal. She took a deep breath and said, “I used to do this.”

The Doctor looked up. “Do what?”

Yaz gestured at the beach, the drawing in the sand, the Doctor.

“Draw circles on alien beaches?” the Doctor asked skeptically.

“Literally, no. Figuratively, yes.”

The Doctor looked at her in noncomprehension for a few seconds, and then Yaz saw realisation dawn on her.  
“Oh.”

“Yeah,” she sighed. “So when someone does... _this_.” She gestured vaguely at the situation and searched for words. “I just know how _I_ felt when I did that.”

The Doctor averted her eyes again and started scratching purposeless lines in the sand.

“And I don’t know,” Yaz tried, very tentatively, “if that means–”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” the Doctor snapped.

“Why don’t you come sit with us then?” It was an invitation, not a challenge. She wasn’t sure the Doctor was going to take it as such.

“Just wanted some time to think.”

“Think some bad thoughts?”

The Doctor stood up and shook the sand from her coat. “If you want to call it that.”

Yaz followed suit. “You can come sit with us. We’re all doing our own thing, you can draw there. We won’t ask.”

The Doctor deflated a little, the fight leaving her, and she looked at the big circle.

“There’s no space for this,” she said quietly.

Yaz wanted to call her out on her cryptic half-answers again, but seeing the look on the Doctor's face, it didn’t seem like the time.

“We’ll make space,” she said instead.

The Doctor only shook her head. Yaz didn’t know what that meant, but the Doctor invited her to walk back with her anyway, so she didn’t make a point of it.

On the way back to Ryan and Graham, the Doctor showed Yaz everything she had in her pockets, one by one. Stacking it into Yaz’s hands when her own got full. It was a peace offering, Yaz thought. A way to smooth over the cracks in the façade, she thought too.

The first circles Yaz had noticed on the beach were in the process of being eaten by the sea.

“That’s a shame,” Yaz said.

“That’s time,” the Doctor said.

Dark as it was, they almost tripped over Ryan and Graham when they reached them.

“It’s got dark,” Ryan said.

“Yes,” the Doctor agreed. “Time to move on.”

**Author's Note:**

> it's been a week already since i posted something! im writing like one hundred things at the same time. i keep getting distracted
> 
> yaz trying to talk to the doctor and the doctor Not Talking is apparently something i like to write. i think i've written a scene like this 4 times now? sometimes it's 'the doctor doesnt talk and yaz lets her' and sometimes it's 'the doctor doesnt talk and yaz won't let her'. here i did both!
> 
> i just like the tension between these two you know? i like how yaz is also private and will allow the doctor her privacy until she gets too upset and then she starts demanding answers. 
> 
> i like this charged atmosphere that can exist between them where theyre not talking about anything but they both know what it is theyre not talking about. and i always make them talk in these roundabout ways where the things around them become conduits for the things they're actually saying. like in 'good night' they're talking about meteors but theyre not really. and in 'looking for someone who's looking for us' theyre talking about the tardis but theyre not really. and here theyre talking about drawings but theyre not really
> 
> also theyre not drawings! i think that was clear but just so no one's confused, that's absolutely gallifreyan. i just love how the doctor is like 'okay you caught me in this moment of vulnerability where i didnt want you to see me and theres nothing i can do about that, but im not giving up the fact that im WRITING, im just gonna keep calling it drawing'
> 
> it's good because then during that whole conversation about drawing and thoughts she's just lying. she's just lying! 13 is SUCH a liar, really, i love her. she was honestly just writing a whooole lot. i mean that big circle. thats like, pages and pages of stuff
> 
> also i just really like the idea of the doctor sitting there with yaz, next to this enormous chunk of text of just really personal thoughts and feelings. right under yaz's nose, but she doesnt know. it feels very 13. because like if she'd said it was writing, that wouldve been risky, yaz couldve figured stuff out, but now, letting yaz believe it's drawing, yaz still gets very close to whats going on, especially considering how little information the doctor has actually given her, but she cant /really/ know whats going on. and if the doctor had said it was writing, that wouldve been giving yaz keys to the castle basically
> 
> (also im putting this in the Night series even though there's no title that fits because the theme fits. also it's basically the exact same scene as good night, whatever. also im still bad at titles and it's called starry night because then we still have the series 6 theme even though there's like 1 reference to stars in this)
> 
> let me know what you thought!  
> im on tumblr: https://you-have-to-use-your-imagination.tumblr.com/  
> (i write a lot of meta on there)


End file.
